Research Guides: Business Research: Healthcare Business Resources

Researching the Business of Healthcare

This portion of the guide is specifically dedicated to researching the business of healthcare.

Are you...

writing a business plan or preparing for a pitch in the healthcare space?
researching a company and its competitors in the medical devices market for an interview or class project?
curious about specific healthcare sectors, such as pharma, oncology, providers, insurance, and more?
looking for articles about hospital administrative best practices and operations?
identifying healthcare data, studies or surveys?

Explore the many databases and internet resources identified in this section.

Look at Emory's Woodruff Health Sciences Library Recommended Clinical Resources.

For further information on searching and navigating these resources effectively, see the PDF version of the healthcare guide below.

Industry & Market Research

GlobalData: Medical Devices This link opens in a new window
Excellent source of global market research and data on the market devices sector, both pipeline and marketed products; covers manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors. Includes: market and competitive intelligence; strategic planning; deals/M&A; innovation and R&D; marketing, monetization, and more.
NOTE: Requires VPN for remote access.
GlobalData: Pharmaceutical This link opens in a new window
Excellent source of global market research and data; market and competitive intelligence, strategic planning, deals/M&A, innovation and R&D, marketing, and more. Coverage includes: 1) Sales data for pipeline and marketed drugs, including analyst sales consensus and forecasts; 2) Regulatory Milestones Tracker for drug expires and review designations; 3) Trials; 4) Clinical Investigators; 5) In-depth disease analysis and forecasts for 120+ disease markets; and 6) Analysis of disease populations, annualized forecasts of incidence and/or prevalent cases.
NOTE: Requires VPN for remote access.
Standard and Poor's Net Advantage This link opens in a new window
Substantive industry profiles, including current trends, key public companies and financials, how the industry operates, industry assocations and government websites.

There are several relevant Industry Surveys:
• Health Care Providers & Services
• Health Care Equpment & Supplies
• Insurance
• Pharmaceuticals
• Biotechnology

To access a Survey:
• Click Industry Surveys tab at top of page
• Click View All or click Pull down Select a GICS Industry>select relevant Survey

First Research in ABI/INFORM
These industry overviews discuss issues not found in the S&P Industry Surveys, including Industry Forecasts, Business Challenges, Trends, Opportunities, Executive Insights, Financials, and Websites & Acronyms.

There are multiple Healthcare Industry Overviews including:
• Nursing Homes and Long Term Care
• Rehabilitation Therapy
• Outpatient Surgical Centers
• Hospitals
• Health Insurance Carriers
• Ambulatory Health Care Services
• Ambulatory Health Care Services
• Nursing Homes & Long-Term Care Facilities
• Outpatient Surgical Centers
• Physicians
• Home Health Care Services

How to Locate Market Research Reports in ABI Inform

BCC Research Reports This link opens in a new window
Substantive market research reports.
Related categories include:
Healthcare, Medical Devices & Surgical, Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Click My Categories, then click the category to display a list of all the related reports.
Coverage includes: medical devices, diagnostics, tissue, surgical, biopsy, MRI, mobile health, orthopedic, monitoring, laboratory, telemedicine, and more.
The Pharmaceutical reports focus on: Pharmaceutical manufacturers, cancer, oncology, prevention and treatment, therapeutics, vaccines, clinical studies, drug delivery, immunology, and more.
You can also conduct keyword searches.
EMIS Intelligence This link opens in a new window
Substantive market research reports for many health care sectors.
Use the Guide to Locating EMIS Market Research Reports below to run a successful search.

Guide to Locating EMIS Market Research Reports

Statista This link opens in a new window
Excellent resource for quick industry statistics; includes cites to all sources of the statistics. Also includes reports/studies and dossiers.
TIP: Limit keyword searches to 1-2 words.
TIP: When clicking on a data graphic, click on Source to quickly hyperlink to the original source of the data.

Much of the aggregate data is available for download/exported, although the underlying microdata is not
Much of the aggregate data is available for download/exported, although the underlying microdata is not.
Richard K. Miller Market Research Handbooks (RKMA) This link opens in a new window
Look at the Healthcare Business Market Research Handbook.
This is NOT a market research report. Rather it is a guide to key industry statistics and the sources gathering this data and analysis.

TIP: Start with scanning the Table Of Contents to quickly identify relevant content and terminology.

Consulting Firm White Papers

Consulting firm white papers are incredibly rich and credible sources of market and industry available for free online. They are well-researched and provide citations for the sources the analysts used. Think of these as mini market research reports - they are typically under 20 pages long, but they provide excellent snapshots of the landscape of a particular industry, including challenges, trends, opportunities, and much more.

You can locate consulting firm white papers (Deloitte, PWC, EY, KPMG, Bain, MCG, McKinsey, Accenture) through a simple Google search by using the inurl tool. Only search one consulting firm at a time, change the name for each additional firm. Use advanced Google search strategies to find even more tips for locating consulting firm white papers.

Examples:

telemedicine inurl:deloitte
drug pricing inurl:mckinsey
("medical technology" OR "medical devices") (monetization OR commercialization) inurl:bain

Academic Articles & Industry/Business News

PubMed This link opens in a new window
Academic articles from both medical research and healthcare administrative/operational journals.
These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. PubMed includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources.

Academic Journals
To access full text of these and other academic journal articles, start with PubMed.

New England Journal of Medicine
Journal of Hospital Medicine
Journal of Medical Economics
Journal of the American Medical Directors' Association

Factiva This link opens in a new window
Search healthcare industry trade magazines, such as Hospitals, and national and international newspapers and wires for relevant industry information.

Factiva Search Strategies

Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Includes healthcare industry trade magazines and academic journals.
ABI/Inform Complete (at ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Includes healthcare industry trade magazines and academic journals.

Healthcare Finance News
The leading news source for developments in the healthcare finance industry. Through its highly integrated platform, its team of award-winning editors deliver breaking news, in-depth reporting, analysis and best practices around compelling topics such as capital investments, reimbursements, quality and safety, physician relations, billing collections a data integrity and how they affect both providers and payers alike.
Hospitals & Health Networks
A B2B brand intended for hospital system executives and emerging leaders. Through peer-to-peer guidance and analysis of best practices, innovative strategies and real-world solutions, H&HN identifies emerging trends and presents hospital and health system leaders with ways to transform their organizations to meet the Triple Aim: better health, better health care, more efficient costs.
Modern Healthcare
Covers recent developments and regulatory issues in the health care industry; includes interviews and statistics.
Health Affairs
Covers broad health policy issues.
Health Plan Week
Covers managed health care regulatory developments and company-specific developments regarding Medicare and/or Medicaid.
Managed Care
Covers trends and developments in the health care industry, including physician and HMO provider contracts, physician networks, regulatory developments, interviews, and statistics.
Becker’s Hospital Review
Features up-to-date business and legal news and analysis relating to hospitals and health systems. Content is geared toward high-level hospital leaders (CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CMOs, CIOs, etc.) and covers hospital and health system news, best practices and legal guidance specifically for these decision-makers

Becker’s has a number of other different health care sector sites:
ASC, Spine, Clinical, Health IT, CFO, Dental + DSO, and Payer.
MedPac Primer
This primer contains a series of brief overviews of how Medicare’s payment systems function. This resource is intended for policymakers and others to better understand how Medicare pays for health care services.
Health Facilities Management
Focused on professionals who design, build, maintain, and operate hospitals and other health care facilities.
The Hospital Leader, Blog of the Society of Hospital Medicine
The Hospital Leader is the official blog of the Society of Hospital Medicine, the medical society dedicated to promoting exceptional care for hospitalized patients, and improving hospitals through innovation and collaboration.

The Hospital Leader features bloggers who provide insights and expertise on the most compelling issues in the specialty of hospital medicine, including:

Patient safety and quality improvement
The hospitalist team
Patient perspective
Advocacy and healthcare policy
Clinical updates
The Hospitalist
The Hospitalist newsmagazine is an official publication of the Society of Hospital Medicine, reporting on issues and trends in hospital medicine. The Hospitalist reaches more than 35,000 hospitalists, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, medical residents, and healthcare administrators interested in the practice and business of hospital medicine.

Industry Associations
Associations are great sources of industry news, data, surveys, and more. Following is a list of some of the largest healthcare associations, but there may be others relevant to your particular topic:

American Hospital Association (AHA)
American Medical Association (AMA)
Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)
Federation of American Hospitals (FAH)

Academies and Societies
Medical specialty areas often describe their "association" as an academy. These are often excellent sources of practice-based data (e.g. number of surgeries performed, fee structures, etc.)
For example:
American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons
American Academy of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery

Industry Data

Emory's Data Center: Healthcare Data
Descriptions and links to a wealth of health related data.
National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)
The CDC's center for health-related studies, surveys, and data.

PolicyMap (Policy Map) This link opens in a new window
A GIS mapping tool that allows users to plot data for U.S. geographical locations.
Health data includes: vital statistics, health status, diseases, risk factors, costs & insurance (medical spending estimates, health insurance costs, and medicare), access to medical care, health facilities, and more.

Community Health Report - generate a summary of healthcare access, health behaviors, general health, morbidity, mortality, food security, and social determinants of health in your target community.

Other available data: census, bankruptcy, food, crime, housing, income & spending, economy, education, and more.
Create custom heat maps and download data into Excel.
SageData This link opens in a new window
Global and country-by-country data from sources such as U.S. federal agencies and intergovernmental organizations.
Health and Vital Statistics coverage: Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, disabilities, food availability, incidence of cancer (SEER), leading causes of death, medicare part D opiod prescriber summary data, infectious diseases, and your risk behavior surveillance system, high school.
Other data includes: crime, population, finance, industry, political, and more.
Data sets can be overlaid; all raw data can be downloaded into Excel.
Create maps and reports from data you select from over 640 datasets. Subjects include health, crime, population, finance, industry, and marketing. Data is available for the world as a whole or for selected countries. Data for the U.S. are shown by state, often by county, sometimes by census tract and zip code. Time series data may go back several decades. Data sources include the U.S. government and the World Bank.
Simply Analytics (formerly SimplyMap) This link opens in a new window
Explore U.S. consumer behavior for health-related purchases and choices. Create heat maps and tables.
Get started by clicking on Browse by Category>Health on the left.

The following quasi-government and economic organizations include world health data and publications.

Government Regulations

CMS.gov
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) website is a central portal for information, regulations, research and data.

Coverage include:
Medicare, Medicaid/CHIP, Medicare-Medicaid Coordination, Private Insurance, Innovation Center, Regulations & Guidance, Research, Statistics, Data & Systems, and Outreach & Education.
Affordable Care Act
Regulations, policies, coverage, and more.

Drug Prices

Sources of Drugs and Natural Products Information
Emory's Woodruff Health Sciences librarians created this list of recommended resources. Look at the Drugs and Natural Products section.

AccessMedicine This link opens in a new window
Click link to Drugs at the top of the page to look up individual drugs for a range of pricing information.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
CMS' Office of the Actuary annual produces projections of healthcare spending for categories within the National Health Expenditure Accounts, which track health spending by source of funds (for example, private health insurance, Medicare, medicaid), by type of service (hospital, physician, prescription drugs, etc.) and by sponsor (businesses, households, governments). Includes foretasted projections.
CMS Annual Financial Reports
National Average Drug Acquisition Cost (NADAC)
Pharmacy Pricing
CMS Drug Spending
CMS has released several information products that provide greater transparency on spending for drugs in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
The CMS Drug Spending Dashboards are interactive, web-based tools that provide spending information for drugs in the Medicare Part B and D programs as well as Medicaid. The Dashboards focus on average spending per dosage unit and change in average spending per dosage unit over time. The tools also include additional manufacturer-level drug spending information as well as consumer-friendly descriptions of the drug uses and clinical indications.
Machine-readable CMS Drug Spending Summary Data Files, which include the data in the Dashboards as well as additional spending and utilization data for the most recent five years, are available for download in Excel.
The Part B Discarded Drug Units report is a set of summary tables that presents spending information for Medicare Part B drugs claims that were identified as having discarded amounts of a drug.
CMS Dashboards
The Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics (OEDA) at CMS has developed interactive dashboards that present information on state and county level variation in standardized per-capita costs for the Medicare fee-for-service population.
The dashboards include total standardized per capita spending, as well as standardized per capita spending by type of service. The interactive format allows users to select the indicator and year they want to display. Users can also compare data for a given state or county to the national average.
Measuring Prescription Drug Prices: A Primer on the CPI Prescription Drug
Written by The U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, October 2019, the purpose of this primer is to review different
measures of prescription drug price changes and discuss their strengths and limitations. A
large body of economic research has developed a standard approach to measure price
changes. In light of this research, we conclude that the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) CPI
Prescription Drug Index (CPI-Rx) is the best available summary measure of the price changes
of prescription drugs. Understanding how the CPI-Rx addresses the issues and challenges of
measuring prescription drug inflation highlights the shortcomings of other measures that fail
to address the measurement challenges

Kaiser Family Foundation

KFF is an endowed, non-profit organization filling the need for trusted, independent information on national health issues; focused on policy analysis, polling and survey research. Contents includes: P
Prescription Drug Resources
Affordable Care Act

Peterson-KFF Health Spending Tracker

Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker
The Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) are partnering to monitor how well the U.S. healthcare system is performing in terms of quality and cost. The Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker provides clear, up-to-date information on trends, drivers and issues that impact the performance of the system. It also illustrates how the U.S. is performing relative to other countries and how different parts of the system are performing relative to one another.